WordPress will no longer use React?

Few weeks ago, Facebook announced that React would be under BSD + Patents licence. After that ASF( Apache Software Foundation) made the decision that BSD + Patents licence would be under Category-X licence. That means that React would not be allowed for Apache.org projects.

According to facebook —

We appreciate all the issues that have been opened asking questions and engaging us. We have considered possible changes carefully, but we won’t be changing our default license or React’s license at this time. We recognize that we may lose some React community members because of this decision. We are sorry for that, but we need to balance our desire to participate in open source with our desire to protect ourselves from costly litigation. We think changing our approach would inhibit our ability to continue releasing meaningful open source software and increase the amount of time and money we have to spend fighting meritless lawsuits.

A blog post written by Matt Mullenweg from wordpress said — Few years ago Automattic (the company developed wordpress) decided to use React for Calypso — ground up rewrite of wordpress, that was believed to be one of the largest react based open source project and team was very happy with the React. Recently WordPress community started using React in Gutenberg core project.

In blog post he wrote

We had a many-thousand word announcement talking about how great React is and how we’re officially adopting it for WordPress, and encouraging plugins to do the same. I’ve been sitting on that post, hoping that the patent issue would be resolved in a way we were comfortable passing down to our users.

That post won’t be published, and instead I’m here to say that the Gutenberg team is going to take a step back and rewrite Gutenberg using a different library. It will likely delay Gutenberg at least a few weeks, and may push the release into next year.

The choice of library will be primarily a technical decision but they are looking for the library that covers most benefits of the React.